President Trump Nominates Chris Wray for FBI Director

This morning President Trump announced that he would nominate Chris Wray as the next Director of the FBI. I worked with Wray in the Justice Department. He was the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division when I was Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel.

Wray is smart, serious, and professional. He doesn’t have quite the range of experiences that his two predecessors did. But he has deep experience with federal criminal law and the FBI. I think Trump’s firing of James Comey was a travesty. But Wray is a good choice, a much better choice than any name* of the politicians I previously saw floated, and a much better choice than I expected Trump to make. Without prejudging what will surely be a probing confirmation process, I think Wray is qualified to be Director of the FBI.

* I changed this to reflect my original intention. I did not pay close attention to all the various names floated for the FBI slot.

Jack Goldsmith is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor at Harvard Law School, co-founder of Lawfare, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Before coming to Harvard, Professor Goldsmith served as Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel from 2003-2004, and Special Counsel to the Department of Defense from 2002-2003.